Waking State: Rapid Variations Modulate Neural and Behavioral Responses

By Matthew McGinley, Martin A. Vinck, Jacob Reimer, R. Batista-Brito, Edward Zagha, C. Cadwell, Andreas S. Tolias, Jessica A. Cardin, David A. McCormick. Neuron, 2015

716 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The state of the brain and body constantly varies on rapid and slow time scales. These variations contribute to the apparent noisiness of sensory responses at both the neural and behavioral level. Recent investigations of rapid state changes in awake, behaving animals have provided insight into the mechanisms by which optimal sensory encoding and behavioral performance are achieved. Fluctuations in state, as indexed by pupillometry, impact both the “signal” (sensory evoked response) and the “noise” (spontaneous activity) of cortical responses. By taking these fluctuations into account, neural response (co-)variability is significantly reduced, revealing the brain to be more reliable and predictable than previously thought.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9951ccf408273066281346c5a29f0478117b4e37

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In Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience

In Cognitive Neuroscience

Citations in the corpus

The Dynamics of Functional Brain Networks: Integrated Network States during Cognitive Task Performance (2015, neutral): “In our final experiment, we demonstrated that the fluctuations in network cartography in the resting state correlate with changes in pupil diameter (Figure 4), which itself is a marker of arousal and behavioral engagement (McGinley et al., 2015).”
Computational Implications of Biophysical Diversity and Multiple Timescales in Neurons and Synapses for Circuit Performance (2016, background): “Recent studies have underscored the widely variable internal dynamics and responsiveness to external stimuli across different behavioral contexts and brain states [90].”
Neural Circuitry of Wakefulness and Sleep (2017, neutral): “Blue circles with hatching denote NREM sleep-promoting nuclei. much less sleep after lesions of the anterior hypothalamus (McGinty and Sterman, 1968).”
Switching between internal and external modes: A multiscale learning principle (2017, background): “…over milliseconds (Hasselmo, 2006; Hasselmo, Bodelón, & Wyble, 2002) and seconds (Douchamps, Jeewajee, Blundell, Burgess, & Lever, 2013; Duncan, Sadanand, & Davachi 2012); and overall arousal ﬂuctuates within the waking state (McGinley et al., 2015b) as well as on the timescale of wake and sleep.”